Chapter 7: Digital Possession
The ache lasted three days. A deep, bruised tenderness that made sitting in lecture halls a focused act of endurance. I’d shift in the hard plastic seat and feel it, a stark, physical memory that would steal my breath. My dorm room in Boston was a bland, beige box. I’d taped the Shanghai metro map to one wall, the creases pronounced, a few locations circled in red ink that was now fading. The postcard of the Huangpu River was tacked next to it. On my desk, in a small ceramic dish I’d bought in a Xintiandi boutique, lay the dried-out tea bag from our last pot of longjing. It was brittle, scentless now, but I kept it there like a holy relic.
The purple silicone was buried in my sock drawer. I hadn’t touched it. Taking it out felt like admitting something I wasn’t ready to admit: that this was now a tool for memory, not connection.
The time difference was a cannibal. It ate our days. Her late night was my early morning. My evening was her dawn. We texted in staggered, disembodied clips that felt like shouting into a canyon and waiting forever for a faint echo.
Me (2:14 PM): The fall here smells like dead leaves and diesel. It’s nothing like the jasmine.
Her (2:17 AM, next day): My dorm room has concrete walls. No calligraphy. It’s very loud. I miss the quiet of the aunt’s apartment.
The words were polite. They were graves.
On the fourth night, or rather, early on the fifth morning, my phone buzzed on the pillow next to my head. A video call request. Li Shuting. The screen glowed in the dark room. 3:07 AM.
My heart did something violent and sick in my chest. I swiped to answer.
Her face filled the screen, pixelated and beautiful under the harsh, cheap light of what must have been her Beijing dorm. She looked exhausted. Shadows pooled under her eyes. She wasn’t in bed. She was sitting at a desk, a bleak wall behind her.
“Vy.” Just my name. It sounded frayed.
“Shuting. It’s so late. Are you okay?”
“No.” She said it plainly. Her gaze was direct, unblinking. “I can’t sleep. I can’t think. All I can do is remember. And it’s making me angry.”
I pushed myself up against my headboard, the sheets pooling around my waist. I was wearing an old t-shirt, nothing else. “Remember what?”
“Everything. The wall. The floor. The taste of you. The sound you made when I finally…” She trailed off, her jaw tight. She looked away from the camera, her throat working. When she looked back, her eyes were fierce and wet. “I need to see you. Not like this. Not just your face.”
I understood. A current, dark and electric, snapped to life in the pit of my stomach. “What do you need?”
“Take your shirt off.”
The command, delivered in her quiet, academic tone, was more potent than any shout. My fingers felt clumsy. I pulled the soft cotton up over my head, let it fall to the floor. The dorm room air was cool on my skin. I saw her gaze drop, taking in the bareness of my shoulders, the shadow between my breasts.
“More,” she said, her voice dropping to a husk. “All of it. Now.”
I kicked the sheets away. I was completely naked. The phone was propped against my raised knees, the camera aimed down the length of my body. I felt wildly exposed, and yet, more seen than I had in weeks. This was her gaze. This was the only one that mattered.
“Look at you,” she murmured, almost to herself. A muscle ticked in her cheek. “You’re there. And I’m here.” She leaned closer to her camera, her face looming. “It’s not enough. I need to be inside that room. I need to be in you.”
“Then tell me how,” I whispered.
Her instructions were clear, clinical, and filthy. “Get the toy. The one from the bag. Don’t use a condom. I want to see it go into you clean.”
I slid off the bed, my legs unsteady. I went to the dresser, opened the sock drawer. The purple silicone was cool and inert. I carried it back to bed, holding it up so her camera could see.
“Good.” Her breath hitched. “Now get on your back. Put the phone beside your head. I want to watch your face. I want to see what I do to you from two thousand miles away.”
I arranged the phone on the pillow, the screen showing her intense, frozen expression. I lay back, my head turning to keep her in view. The mattress was cold.
“Do it,” she ordered. “Get yourself wet for me. Use your mouth if you have to. I want to see you taste yourself.”
A hot shameful thrill shot through me. I brought my fingers to my mouth, sucked them until they were slick with saliva, then dragged them down my body. I parted my folds, circling my clit, a slow, teasing motion for her benefit. A soft moan escaped me. On the screen, her eyes were burning coals.
“Fuck, Vy. Just like that. Now the toy. Put it at your entrance. Show me.”
I pressed the cool, blunt tip against me. My body was already clenching in anticipation, a visceral memory of the last time, against the wall, her body anchoring me.
“Push.”
I did. A slow, shallow inch. The stretch was familiar and alien. It was just me, now. Not her.
“Harder,” she snapped. Her voice had lost its control. “Don’t be gentle. Fuck yourself with it. Hard. Make the bed shake so I can hear it.”
I obeyed. I thrust the toy into myself, a deep, punishing stroke that shoved me up the mattress. The bedframe knocked against the wall with a dull thud. The sound was obscenely loud in the quiet dorm.
“Again.”
I did it again. And again. Setting a brutal, lonely rhythm. The slap of silicone against my skin, the creak of the springs, my own ragged breathing filled my ears. My eyes were locked on her screen. Her face was a mask of agonized concentration.
“Is it good?” she demanded, her voice rough. “Does it feel like I’m there?”
“It’s not the same,” I panted, driving the toy deeper, hitting a spot that made my vision blur. “It’s empty.”
“Then imagine it’s me.” Her image on the screen jostled. She was moving her own phone. The view shifted, swooping down. Now I was looking at the ceiling of her Beijing dorm, then the edge of her desk, then… her own lap. She had pulled down her sweatpants and underwear. Her hand was between her legs, fingers working in a frantic, blurry motion. “I’m touching myself, Vy. I’m fucking myself thinking about you fucking yourself with my toy. Do you see?”
I saw. The dark thatch of hair, the flash of her pale fingers moving fast and wet. The reality of it—her parallel desperation—unlocked something violent in me.
“God, yes, I see,” I groaned. My hips took over, pistoning, fucking up onto the toy with a mindless, driving need. The bed was hammering against the wall now, a steady, frantic drumbeat. “I’m close, Shuting. Fuck, I’m so close.”
“Look at me!” she cried out. Her camera angled back up to her face. She was flushed, her lips parted, her eyes wild and unfocused. She was right on the edge. “Come with me. Don’t you dare come without me.”
Her command tipped me over. The orgasm ripped through me, brutal and solitary. I cried out, my back arching off the bed, my fingers cramping around the toy as I ground it deep inside, milking the fake sensation for every drop of pathetic, distant pleasure it could give. On the screen, she stifled her own shout against her wrist, her body seizing, her face contorted in a silent, mirrored release.
The silence afterward was deafening. Broken only by our ragged, synchronized gasps for air. I lay there, spent, the toy still lodged inside me, a cheap placeholder. The screen showed her, slumped back in her chair, her eyes closed, sweat gleaming on her temple.
Slowly, I pulled the toy out. The sound was wet, definitive. I dropped it on the rumpled sheets beside me, a thing of plastic and failure.
She opened her eyes. They found the camera, found me. The fierce need was gone, replaced by a hollow, devastating sadness.
“It’s not enough,” she said quietly, stating a simple, unbearable fact.
“No,” I whispered. “It’s not.”
We stayed on the call until my phone battery warned of its death. We didn’t speak. We just watched each other breathe across the impossible distance, two people in beige boxes, haunted by the ghost of a green door. When the screen finally went black, I reached over and picked up the dried tea bag from the dish. I crushed it in my fist. It disintegrated into a scentless, bitter dust.
The dust clung to the sweat in the creases of my palm. I stared at it, this pathetic residue of what had once been fragrant and alive. My room smelled like stale heat and my own spent body. The purple toy lay on the stained sheet like a piece of evidence.
Three sharp knocks hit my door. “Vy? Everything okay in there? Sounded like a war zone.”
Maya’s voice, sleep-thickened and annoyed, sliced through the haze. My roommate. I’d forgotten her, forgotten the thin walls, forgotten everything but the pixelated rage on Shuting’s face.
“Fine!” I called, my voice strangled. “Sorry! I… fell out of bed.”
A grunt. Footsteps retreating. The shame was instant, hot, and comprehensive. I pulled the sheet over myself, a shroud. My phone, now charging, buzzed on the nightstand. A text. Not Shuting.
Maya (3:22 AM): lol what a way to go. try not to die before the party saturday.
The party. A vague, gregarious blob on my calendar. People I was supposed to want to know. Kegs. Small talk. A life.
Then, another buzz. This one from her.
Shuting (3:45 PM her time): Hey.
Just that. I waited, the silence in the text thread a physical pressure.
Shuting: You know doing this is not good.
I stared at the words. My throat tightened.
Shuting: We should control our need better. Especially I live with a roommate yk.
The casual abbreviation, the practical concern, felt like a door slamming. This was the morning-after correction. The walk of shame in textual form.
Shuting: And I have a party upcoming.
A party. Of course. A parallel universe of socialization. Her new life, cementing itself.
Shuting: We also took a lot of photos together to post occasionally.
My mind flashed to the thousands of images on my phone. Her laughing, a smear of red bean paste on her lip by the Bund. Our fingers intertwined on the futon, light cutting across our wrists. Private glyphs.
Shuting: I’ll post a soft launch of us on my main account IG story tmrr.
The air left my lungs. A soft launch. The term was so deliberate, so curated. It was a claiming and a concealment in one. It was for her audience, not for me. It was the creation of a manageable, palatable narrative out of our chaotic, green-door ruin. My heart hammered against my ribs, a trapped, furious bird.
I typed three different responses and deleted each one. What was there to say? Don’t? I’m not a product. Which photo?
I finally sent: A soft launch.
The ellipsis appeared. Bubbled. Stopped.
Shuting: It’s what we can have.
What we can have. A digital breadcrumb. A performance for her followers. The opposite of the raw, screaming truth of thirty minutes ago. This was control. This was her trying to build a dam against the flood she herself had just unleashed. It felt like a betrayal more profound than any distance.
The next twenty-four hours were a tinnitus whine of anticipation. I refreshed her Instagram a dozen times an hour. I attended classes in a fog, the phantom ache between my legs a constant reminder of the failure of control. Maya chattered about party outfits. I nodded, seeing only Shuting’s face, lit by her phone screen in a Beijing dorm.
It appeared at 8:17 PM my time. Saturday morning for her.
A notification: user @lishuting_ posted a story.
My hand trembled. I clicked.
It wasn’t a photo of our faces. It was our hands. The one from the futon, the light cutting across our intertwined wrists. The focus was soft, artistic. The caption was a single, innocuous peach emoji. A heartbeat later, a second story. A shot of two empty tea cups on the low table in Zhou’s aunt’s apartment, the calligraphy scroll a blur in the background. The caption: “想念。”
Miss. Not I miss you. Just the verb, hanging there, profound and impersonal.
It was beautiful. It was agony. It was a masterclass in suggestion, giving away nothing while screaming everything to anyone who knew how to look. I saw the likes pop up. Comments from usernames with Chinese characters: “美丽!” “朋友?” “氛围感拉满。”
I felt violently exposed and completely erased.
My phone rang. Video call. Her again. The party must be over, or she’d left it. Her background was dark, quiet. Her makeup was smudged, her eyes glittering with a dangerous, defiant sheen. She was a little drunk.
“You saw,” she said. No greeting.
“I saw. It’s beautiful.” My voice was flat.
“It’s safe.”
“Is it?” I shot back, the bitterness leaking out. “A peach emoji? ‘Miss’? Who is that for, Shuting? For me, or for them?”
“For us!” she insisted, her composure cracking. “It’s what we can have. A piece of us, out in the world. A flag planted. Don’t you understand?”
“I understand that you’re trying to put our fucking wildfire in a nice, Instagram-friendly jar.” I was shaking. “It’s a lie. The truth was you making me fuck myself raw so you could hear my bed hit the wall.”
Her expression shattered. The careful curator vanished, replaced by the raw, hungry girl from the green door. The one who owned me.
“You want truth?” Her voice dropped to a venomous whisper. “Your truth is you’re alone in your bed right now. My truth is I just left a room full of people who want to know me, and all I could think about was the specific smell of you when I’d lick you open. That’s the truth.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“The photo I almost posted,” she continued, her eyes locked on mine. “It wasn’t our hands. It was a different one. From that last morning. You were sleeping. The sheet was down to your waist. The light was on the bruises my mouth left all over your back.”
A low whimper escaped me. I remembered that photo. She’d taken it without me knowing. It was a violation. It was the most intimate thing I’d ever seen.
“I want to see them,” I breathed. “Show me. Show me the photo you didn’t post.”
“No.” She leaned in. “I want to see the bruises now. I want to see if I’m still there on your skin. Get on your stomach. Show me your back.”
It was not a request. It was a reclamation. The controlled soft launch was ashes. This was the inferno.
I flipped the phone, propping it against the headboard, angling it down. I turned over, pressing my face into the pillow. I heard her sharp intake of breath.
“The light,” she commanded. “Turn on the overhead. I need to see.”
I reached a blind hand, fumbling for the switch. Harsh, unforgiving dorm light flooded the room, bleaching everything. I was completely displayed, the wreckage of our parting probably faded to nothing but pale yellow ghosts on my skin.
“I don’t see them,” she said, and the disappointment was savage. “They’re gone.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled into the fabric, feeling a ridiculous guilt.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said, her tone shifting, becoming focused, surgical. “Make new ones. Right now. Where I can see.”
“What?”
“You heard me. You have hands. You have teeth. Bruise yourself for me. Mark the territory I can’t reach. Do it where the camera can see.”
The order was so perverse, so deeply twisted, it lit a fuse in my core. It was control and surrender in one act. I was to be both the violator and the consecrated ground.
I reached back, my fingers clumsy. I pinched the skin just above my hipbone, hard, twisting until a bright star of pain burst behind my eyes. A cry caught in my throat.
“Harder,” she whispered from the phone. “Make it last. Make it purple.”
I used my nails then, raking them down the soft flesh of my lower back, leaving fierce, red trails. I bit my own arm, my teeth sinking in until the pressure was a dull, encompassing throb. I was panting, a animal in a trap of my own making, doing her bidding across an ocean.
“Good,” she cooed, her voice thick with arousal. “So good. Now touch yourself. While it hurts. I want to watch you come from the pain I told you to give yourself.”
My hand snaked under my body. I was already wet, a shocking slickness born of shame and obedience and a love that felt like sickness. I rubbed my clit with rough, hurried circles, the fresh sting on my back singing a counterpoint melody to the building tension in my groin.
“Say it,” she demanded. I heard the rustle of fabric on her end, the soft, wet sounds of her own hand working.
“I’m yours,” I choked out, the words muffled by the pillow.
“You are. And this is all we have. This fucking circus. This is our soft launch.” Her voice broke on a sob that turned into a groan. “Come for me. Now.”
The pain and the pleasure fused, a white-hot wire. I climaxed with a silent, shuddering violence, my body seizing, the new burns on my skin screaming in protest and celebration. On the phone, I heard her own fragmented cry, sharp and final.
In the brutal light, I lay ruined. My back felt alive, burning. The screen was dark; she’d ended the call, perhaps unable to bear the aftermath of what she’d demanded.
A new notification glowed on the locked screen. Instagram. @lishuting_ had posted another story.
I opened it with a numb finger.
It was the photo. The one she’d described. Me, sleeping, the sheet down, the bruises on my back in full, lurid display. The caption was just a timestamp: 03:07.
The time of our first, desperate call. The time my bed hit the wall.
It was up for seven seconds before it disappeared, leaving only the two pristine, soft-launch images. A secret broadcast for an audience of one. A truth etched in digital vanishing ink, naked and dangerous and ours.
I curled into a ball, the throbbing on my back a constant, comforting pain. The dam was gone. We had no control at all. And the party, my party, was in six hours.
The party was a drone of bass and strangers’ laughter. I wore a high-waisted skirt to hide the fresh, tender marks on my lower back. Each brush of fabric was a secret whisper from her. Maya handed me a plastic cup of something sweet and toxic. I drank it without tasting.
A guy from my PoliSci seminar leaned into my space, his breath warm with beer. “So, Shanghai, huh? Was it all skyscrapers and soup dumplings?”
I saw the green door. I felt the cool wood grain against my knees. “Yeah,” I said, my voice coming from far away. “It was something.”
He talked. I nodded. My phone was a live wire in my hand. She didn’t text. The photo she’d posted and deleted was a ghost in the ether, a shared haunting. I excused myself, pushed through bodies smelling of perfume and sweat, and escaped to the freezing fire escape.
The metal bit through my clothes. I called her.
She picked up on the second ring. The backdrop was silent now. She was in bed, her hair fanning across a pillow I didn’t recognize. We said nothing for a full minute, just listening to the other’s atmosphere—my distant thump of music, her quiet void.
“Did it work?” she finally asked. Her voice was stripped bare.
“The marks?”
“The distance.”
I took a sharp, cold breath. “No.”
“Good.” She closed her eyes. “Neither did mine.”
The following weeks carved a strange, new rhythm. A détente born of sheer exhaustion. The frantic, midnight demands bled into something quieter, more fatigued.
Texts became logistical.
Shuting: My advisor is a fossil. He wants a fifty-page literature review by Thursday.
Vy: My roommate’s boyfriend basically lives here. He uses my fucking shampoo.
We talked about everything but the ache. It was always there, a third person in the conversation.
The explicit video calls stopped. The commands faded. It wasn’t a decision; it was a slow surrender to the grinding reality of two separate lives building momentum without each other. The stress was a physical wall. We’d try, sometimes.
Once, after a particularly brutal day, I sent her a text in the dead of her night.
Vy: I can’t stop thinking about the way you smelled after rain. Like ozone and skin.
Her reply came hours later.
Shuting: Please. Don’t. I have a 9 am seminar. I need to sleep.
The rejection was gentle, practical, and total. It hurt more than any cruel command. We were learning the anatomy of our impossibility. The need was too big, too disruptive. It threatened the fragile new structures we were trying to inhabit. So we bottled it. We corked it tight. Our communication became a series of careful, surface-level press releases.
Happy Birthday. Congrats on the paper. Hope your flu gets better.
The photos we posted became our only sanctioned language of possession.
On her birthday in November, I scrolled through thousands of images. I selected ten. Not the raw ones, not the sleeping bruise portrait, but the beautiful ones. Her laughing at a street vendor, steam wreathing her face. The two of us squinting into the sun on the Bund, her arm around my waist. A close-up of our hands threaded together on the futon, the one she’d used for her soft launch.
I posted them to my main Instagram story, a cascading flood of intimacy. The caption was simple: “Happy birthday to the one who holds my other half. 生日快乐, 我的.”
My heart pounded as I watched views tick up. Friends from Boston commented, “Who is this?” “Shanghai crush!”, “You two are gorgeous.” Each notification was a little spike of defiance. See her. See us. This happened.
She replied in DMs an hour later.
Shuting: Vy.
Shuting: That was…
Shuting: Thank you. It felt like a hug.
It was the closest we’d come to touching in months.
Winter hardened Boston. My Shanghai tan faded. The purple toy gathered dust in the sock drawer, a fossil from another epoch. We scheduled weekly calls that often felt strained, filled with long pauses where we’d just stare, searching for the people we’d been in that sunlit room.
Chinese Valentine’s Day in February arrived with a fresh blanket of snow. I was walking back from the library, my fingers numb, when the memory ambushed me. Not a sexual one. A quiet one. The weight of my head on her shoulder, the shared, tinny music from a single AirPod, the Shanghai sun melting into the Huangpu River like liquid gold. A perfect, silent moment before the storm.
I found the photo. It was one she’d taken. You could see the curve of her shoulder, the side of my face relaxed in a way it never was anymore, one white wire connecting us. The sunset was a spectacular blur of orange and purple.
Without overthinking, I posted it. No cascading carousel. Just that one image. The caption was a line from an old, cheesy Cantopop song I knew she loved: “一邊聽，一邊走，一直到天黑。”
Listening, walking, until the sky darkens.
It was up for twenty-four hours. A permanent post, not a story. A monument. She didn’t message. She didn’t like it. But an hour after it went live, her profile picture changed. It cropped to a new image: just her shoulder and the side of her head, where mine would have been leaning.
That was her reply. A silent, perfect echo. Our contact was now a curated museum of absence, a map of a country we could no longer inhabit. We had controlled the wildfire into embers. The problem was, embers still glow. And they still burn.